(From official website)

As someone who has worked right across the media, I ‘meet’ the widest range of people through my books for adults and children, journalism and broadcasting. And I love it – especially my latest metamorphosis into an advice columnist, first for The Times and now for the Daily Mail on Saturdays. Believe me, there’s no complacency when I say I am blessed with a terrific life. It hasn’t all been easy. But I guess nobody’s life is…and why should it be?

I was born in Liverpool in 1946, where home was a flat in a low-rise estate called The Green, on Queen’s Drive, near Broadgreen Hospital, where I was born. I went to Northway Primary School and then passed the 11+ to go to Aigburth Vale Girls’ High School. This was old-fashioned state education and it served me very well indeed.
Then when I was 14 my world was turned upside down by a move to the South-West of England, to Trowbridge in Wiltshire. That’s when my beloved, hardworking parents obtained their first mortgage, on a three bed-roomed semi. It was such a step up in the world! I went to the local girls’ grammar school and tried to learn a new accent, in order to fit in. It wasn’t easy. But maybe writers should never really fit in…

When I left school I went to University College London, and in 1969 gained a first class honours degree in English Language and Literature. In 1968 I married my first husband, the broadcaster and writer Jonathan Dimbleby. We met in our second year (he was a philosophy student) and married in a whirlwind after knowing each other just four months. Our marriage was a real meeting of minds and was to last for 35 years, until 2003. Jonathan is one of the best, most wonderful people I have ever met. Still.

When I graduated I expected to go back to Uni and do a PhD as invited by my department, but I was seduced down the primrose path of journalism, and have never regretted not writing that thesis on Sylvia Plath and Vi